Leighton House Museum

Alma-Tadema's Cinematic Legacy

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Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, A Pyrrhic Dance, 1869
Guidhall Art Gallery, City of London

#AlmaTadema

From shortly after his death, early filmmakers turned to
Alma-Tadema’s paintings as they looked for inspiration for their
own recreations of life in antiquity. The appeal of his work
was not just its authentic feel derived from objects, costume and
architecture, but the spatial devises that he had evolved. Tadema’s
dramatic framings of his subjects, his changes in scale, his use of
curtains to divide and reveal space and his incorporation of
different floor levels within a single composition were all picked
up and translated into early film.

The director Cecil B. DeMille was a devotee of
Alma-Tadema’s work, apparently showing prints of Alma-Tadema’s
pictures to his team while they were preparing to film The Ten
Commandments. More recently, Ridley Scott’s
Gladiator derives many details from Alma-Tadema’s works.
Production designer Arthur Max studied Alma-Tadema’s paintings for
their columns, floor mosaics and props. Costume designer Janty
Yates also studied his paintings while working on the film.
Alma-Tadema’s pastel colours and transparent, layered and sometimes
lightly embroidered silks were a direct source of inspiration for
Yates.

Alma-Tadema: At Home in
Antiquity (7 July - 29 October) at Leighton House Museum
includes an audio-visual presentation, located in Leighton's winter
studio, that presents connections between Alma-Tadema’s
pictures and cinematic representations of ancient Greece and
Rome.